Note, this is where users like us can play around with it and give them feedback. DuckDuckGo wants to switch over to the new version in about a month. But that depends, they said, on the feedback.

The new features include:

Smarter answers

Updated design to give a more "refined look"

More images & videos

Auto-suggest search results

Local places

Here are some screen shots and as you can see, it looks Google carousel like:

It is not uncommon for Google's Matt Cutts to chime in on DuckDuckGo features in Hacker News and question some things. He did so yesterday on Hacker News asking how they do auto-suggest when "you don't associate queries with IP addresses, but does DDG save queries."

Someone else pointed out that they do save queries but they do not associate the queries to any identifiable information. They quoted:

To be clear, we still don't collect or share personal information and auto-suggest does not impact that at all. I appreciate it may make you and others uncomfortable and we're sensitive to that, but it is not a change in terms of privacy. We simply do not associate queries with personal information (e.g. IP addresses) and in fact don't store any of it at all.